Newsweek Merges With The Daily Beast... To Shut Down Newsweek?

from the sense-and-nonsense dept

Lots of talk today about the fact that Newsweek, the struggling magazine that's been around for 77 years, has merged with two-year old website The Daily Beast, which never really picked up all that much traffic considering its ambitions. But in an odd move, reports now are saying that the plan is to shut down the Newsweek site and to keep The Daily Beast running. If that's the case... um... why merge at all? Newsweek has the more well known brand and much more traffic. This sounds like an ego merger, where the idea is just to promote the fact that The Daily Beast devoured Newsweek. And that gets you, what, the attention of a tiny group of media business insiders for a couple weeks?